[capocannoniere]

> Frankly, I'm kinda surprised if an obvious optimization like that isn't already in place - let those who care about the shape pay more for the pretty ones, and let those who don't save by buying the rest.

Oh but that's exactly how it already works in existing supply chains: "imperfect" produce gets allocated quite well with food manufacturers, restaurants and food halls, or gets donated to foster homes, hospitals, etc. And many supermarkets do in fact stock up with "imperfect" produce.

"Reducing food waste" makes for good marketing. Except it's not that true.

[jheinvirta]

Thanks, very good point. Important to take into consideration though that we are operating in Mexico and aiming for the LatAm market where this looks different than in the U.S. or Europe where most food waste indeed happens at the consumer level. Contrary in Latin America, 72% of food waste occurs prior to the consumption stage and specifically talking about fruits and veggies 54% are wasted due to supply chain inefficiencies and imperfections. And that already considers the fact that some imperfect produce ends up with food factories etc.

Let me shed some more light on the situation in Mexico (and most of LatAm):

Certainly, imperfect produce is allocated to some extent to food manufacturers, restaurants, etc. - but not enough - the scale of the problem is just too big. Surprisingly, we found that even certain restaurants that wanted to source from us because they don't care about imperfect produce, ended up asking for standards around size or colour.

Another example is what my co-founder's father still lives daily - his limes or mandarines are wasted because of being too small, too big, miscoloured.

In Mexico, we have not seen any supermarket stocking up imperfect produce, not even the very forward-thinking ones, but agree that luckily this is happening in the U.S., Europe and other places, hopefully soon also here.

When it comes to donations, unfortunately less than 5% of food waste ends up with food banks. There is still much to be done on that front too.

We also talked to several farmers who tell us they have imperfect produce on their farm which they do not even pick because they know it will be hard for them to sell and so it's not worth for them to pay someone to pick it.

What is true though is that to leave an important mark we need to get scale.